Various Boost libraries were proposed to the C++ standards committee's
Library Working Group (LWG) at the Redmond meeting for inclusion in the
upcoming Library Technical Report (TR). What follows is my recollection of
the reaction by the LWG to the Random Number proposal.

Jens presented his library, and received a generally favorable reaction.

Although there was some mention that random numbers are closer to the
border of what should be in the standard library than other proposals
(Rational hadn't been presented yet), there seemed to be quite a bit of
interest in the proposal.

The key issue is "How many generators and distributions should be
included?" Like the STL, the library provides a framework. Certainly some
generators and distributions should be included, just as the STL contains
some containers and some algorithms, but just how many? Who
decides? Using what criteria?

A secondary issue is how to write the standardese specification for the
generators and distributions. The LWG probably doesn't want to attempt
detailed specifications for something like a Mersenne Twister generator,
for example. Presumably the standard would just reference some other
document. I'll query the committee's admin folks to see what is an
allowable reference.